Psyko Steve Presents
THE SLAPS

Events
THE SLAPS
with special guests
HEMLOCK
SMOOTH HANDS
Wednesday, February 19th 2024
Doors at 7:00 / Show at 7:30
16+
Advance General Admission Ticket: $17 + fees
Day of Show GA Ticket: $20 + fees
The Slaps
As proven on their strange and beautiful new album Mudglimmer, the looming specter of artistic oblivion pushed The Slaps to lean into their idiosyncrasies: snaking rhythms, complicatedly interlocking guitar riffs, grubby yet alluring poetry, and homespun post-modern Americana sing-alongs all surge with a free-wheeling improvisatory verve informed by free jazz. It’s a stunning DIY comeback story, a doubling-down on avant-garde impulses that pays immediate dividends.
Spontaneous composition and earnest, threadbare folk collide on Mudglimmer. It’s a marvel of influential synthesis, evoking Slint’s comfortability with ominous tension (“Mudglimmer”), Tortoise’s slinky push-pull grooves (“Filthy Sex Manuevers”), Waxahatchee’s slice-of-life Americana gems (“Flip”), elliptical funk-punk a la The Minutemen (“Forward”), minimal grunge-pop in the vein of Sebadoh (“King”) and so much more.
Mudglimmer, in short, rips. Faced with existential threats, The Slaps reconfigured and reenergized — finding purpose, not in reaching for a brass ring, but in becoming fully, unashamedly, their own wonderfully confounding thing.
Hemlock
hemlock is the swamp-raised "phone-fi” alt-folk project of multi-disciplinary creative force Carolina Chauffe and various rotating collaborators, currently anchored between Chicago, Austin, and Louisiana, but more often on the road.
Their most recent album ‘444’ – self-released in October 2024 – is a "best of, so far" of an ongoing song-a-day-for-a-month project, with its 12 carefully chosen tracks recaptured, rearranged, and reimagined in eager collaboration with an all-star Chicago cast.
This is means-to-an-end modern-day folk art for the open-hearted. Eager, intentionally imperfect, prolific.
Doggedly DIY, Chauffe is an avid documenter, an amateur archivist, and a believer in magic, with a discography spanning hundreds of songs in half a decade, including their independently released debut full-band LP 'talk soon' (2022), and 6 months' worth of aforementioned phone-recorded song-a-day collections (2019-present), among other works.
In addition to hemlock, Carolina has toured in Merce Lemon (2023), Babehoven (2022), Fran (2023), and is a long-time member of TX band Little Mazarn.
They are a gatherer, a neighbor, and a hopeful for a free Palestine, for a free tomorrow for all. They will be a road dog for as long as they can, and make music for as long as they live.